Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Line o' the Day


Title of Joel Achenbach's latest post:

Bring Me the Head of Sanjaya Malakar

Indeed. Achenbach goes on to ask, "The deeper philosophical question: Can a person sing so badly as to ruin the original? Or has "You Really Got Me Now" been slimed forever?" Affirmative.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Al Gore's 2nd Annual Carbon-Offset Going-out-of-Business Sale!



Ha. Mah name is Al Gore. You've heard me talk before about the dangers of global warming.


Put simply, humans have destroyed the Earth. While some blame cow poots and others point to solar storms, I know for a fact that the Chevy Impala behind me -- and millions of vehicles like it -- are solely, completely responsible for warming the Earth.


Scientists tell us that over the next five years, sea levels will rise by as much as three hundred feet.


When that happens, millions of folks like you and me will have to leave their Malibu beach homes and migrate to the Midwest. Yes. They'll have to immigrate to... ... ... Red states. No tofu. No pet spas. And lots of pickup trucks. Oh, the humanity.


And look at the glaciers behind me. Never, in the history of the world, have glaciers melted before. Never! Not even after the last ice age!


And, within the next five years, the entire world will be a barren desert reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's Rose Law files. Uhm, except for the parts that are completely underwater. Which will also be... a lot.


And anyone who says otherwise is an unscientific crackpot that should be... slaughtered like a baby seal --er-- I mean like a money-grubbing, American capitalist.


Scientists have also proven that humans caused Hurricane Katrina to explode out of the gulf with a fury never seen before, not even in Galveston, Texas.


But there's a way you can make a difference.


We've found a way that you can pollute all you want.


Yep, you heard me right. Pollute all you want.


With our amazing new product, Carbon Offsets™, you can pollute guilt-free!


How do they work? Say you fly cross-country. Just buy $66 worth of Carbon Offsets™ to make up for your flight!


We'll plant some trees and bushes and s***. So don't worry about it! We'll make up for all of that awful carbon dioxide you're expelling.


Wipe that skeptical look off your face!


What's it gonna take to get you into some Carbon Offsets™ today?


Just call 1-800-CARBON or surf to www.carb0wnt.com now!


Remember, pollute all you want, just so long as you make amends with Carbon Offsets™! It's the feel-good way to spew emissions!


If carbon offsets result in an erection lasting more than four hours, please contact Generation Investment Management.


Oven-baked good readin', just like Mama used to make:
Anchoress, BizzyBlog, Dan Riehl, Ecotality, Hang Right Politics, OTB, Rick Moran
Bullwinkle Blog, Captain's Quarters, Carbon Neutral Journal, Maggie's Notebook, Nuke Gingrich, Random Ruminations, Tax Man Blog

Monday, March 19, 2007

And they say no one can predict the future!


By gum, I'm out to prove "they" wrong. I can guaran-damn-tee that the following will take place within the next two weeks. I just wish my prescience worked on the stock market.


MSNBC's Keith Olbermann will demand that Hillary gets the troops to retreat faster; that Attorney General Gonzales throw himself into a giant margarita blender to make amends for the DOJ firings; and will name George W. Bush the "worst President ever" for standing under a Bong Hits 4 Jesus banner on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.


CNN's Wolf Blitzer will praise the 'resilience' of the Iraq insurgency and describe how the surge ain't working, but will studiously avoid the use of any statistics (because, of course, they clearly show that the surge is working).


The NY Times' Maureen Dowd will, using her patented and well nigh unreadable style, extend her anti-administration op-ed streak to 75. In doing so, she'll use the respectful term "Bushies" four or more times while referencing the ethical integrity of Dan Rather.


The Boston Globe's Richard Cohen will verbally smack himself in the forehead for initially supporting the war; then proceed to pillory the administration, the troops, the poor quality of his George W. Bush Pez dispenser, and the taste of Coors Light Beer ("Coors Light... isn't that redundant?"). Cohen will also lift and reuse several entire paragraphs (using highly advanced "copy" and "paste" word-processing functions) from previous columns.

The Times' Nicholas Kristof will pillory Israel for the lack of progress in the Middle East peace process, despite Oslo Accords and the failure of Palestinian leadership to even acknowledge Israel's right to exist. Hey Nick, I suggest you validate your assertions by negotiating with a suicide bomber when you're buying a slice at Sbarro Pizza.

And they say no one can predict the future.

Gaffe o' the Day


Former actor Ben Jones, who played Cooter on Dukes of Hazzard, in an interview on The O'Reilly Factor:

Racism is something we've got to get behind... BEYOND! BEYOND!

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Iran and the U.S.: transcript from secret negotiations


Our patented Blogoscopic™ technology offers us several advantages over conventional blogs. You know, blogs like LGF, Atlas Shrugs, and Gateway Pundit, which rely upon gathering facts, photos, and attribution. Unburdened with these mundane details, the Blogoscope's latest junket has scooped the world press.

You say you didn't know about the back-channel negotiations between Iran's President Ahmadinejad and a secret diplomatic representative from the U.S.? Try to control your excitement and scroll down very slowly to view this exclusive transcript.


You must know that Iran is a united, coherent and wise nation.


Some countries intend to introduce Iranians to the world as a violent nation with weapons.


We will not back down from our stance and we believe that nuclear energy is our inalienable right.


Would you consider a cultural exchange? For instance, Britney Spears might be available for a concert tour...


Could you throw in JT?


Timberlake? He's touring in Nashville. Maybe in a couple of months.


Well, we couldn't possibly suspend uranium enrichment for a panty-less washout alone.


We're also prepared to open up some Burger King franchises in Iran. You and the Mullahs would have full control of the menu.


So we could wage a jihad against bacon cheeseburgers?


Absolutely. In fact I've brought a completely halal whopper...


Is that what I've been smelling? It smells delicious!


Then, may I present...


...the halal whopper with Cheese and synthetic bacon?


That looks fantastic! Do you have some fries?


Absolutely, they're in the limo. Let me run down and get them.


...mmm... I can't wait for the fries... I'll just unwrap this burger...


**Hehe!** The exploding burger trick. It gets 'em every time. Negotiations... are... complete.

Exclusive Photo: UFO shot down over Iran


Iran's Baztab News is reporting that an "Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) was completely destroyed by the country’s new air defense system" (hat tips: Gateway Pundit and Larwyn). Lucky you: we've got an exclusive photograph of the UFO after it was shot down.


Iran's President Ahmadinejad inspects a UFO shot down by his country's state-of-the-art air defense system. He later called the UFO, "some sort of 'March Madness' inspired by American imperialists."

The NCAA's 'Boss Button'


When CBS switched from the NCAA tournament game I was watching to a game of minimal importance (at least for me), I scrambled for a backup. Remembering the ads for CBS' March Madness on Demand service, which promised live coverage of each game over the Internet, I fired up the trusty web browser.

Locating the site wasn't an issue. The real problem was the NCAA's requirement to use Windows Media Player. On one machine, WMP threw an error attempting to load the stream. I switched to another system. I successfully fired up, waited through the obligatory opening commercials (the tarriff for the hosting charges, one presumes).


At that point, CBS decided to switch back to my game, which I watched on my 57" HDTV screen.

But that's not all I noticed about the online viewing experience. The MMOD website featured a "boss button." The button allows workers -- who are surreptitiously watching games in the office -- to quickly pretend to be working. Click the button...


...and this daunting faux workbook appears!

The only question that remains is when the first lawsuit, alleging loss of productivity, will be filed over the "boss button"?

Over-under says March 30, 2007.

Gathering of Eagles Counter-Protest: 30,000 Strong


Michelle Malkin and Baron Bodissey have tremendous writeups of the Gathering of Eagles counter-protest in Washington.


The motivation?

There was another big anti-war rally today in Washington DC, and an anarchist website tipped its hand by announcing that they intended to vandalize the Vietnam War Memorial as part of the action, as they did earlier with the Capitol building.

Free Republic responded by organizing a massive counter-protest of Vietnam vets and other patriotic volunteers in order to protect the memorial...


Click on the pictures to view Michelle's and Baron's posts, respectively.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

The Problem with Plame's Testimony


Valerie Plame testified yesterday that she "played no part in deciding to send her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, on a mission to Niger in 2002 to assess the reliability of reports that Iraq's then-president, Saddam Hussein, was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from that country for use in a secret nuclear weapons program."


According to Deseret News, Plame countered:

...an assertion by White House officials to reporters that she had sent her husband on the trip, Plame said one of her colleagues broached the idea after a call in early 2002 from Vice President Cheney's office seeking information about Iraqi activity in Niger. Plame said she "wasn't overjoyed" at the suggestion because a trip would leave her alone with their 2-year-old twins.

Still, she said, at the direction of her supervisor, she asked her husband whether he would come to CIA headquarters at suburban Langley, Va., to discuss the possible trip and sent a quick e-mail about the prospect to the chief of the agency's counterproliferation division, where she worked... "I did not suggest him," she said. "There was no nepotism involved. I didn't have the authority."

Gateway Pundit reminds us that Plame's claim -- that she had nothing to do with her husband's trip to Niger -- flies directly in the face of recently declassified meeting notes from 2/19/02.


During the proceedings, Plame also suggested that she was a "covert agent" at the time of the outing.

Only, the person who wrote the law -- Victoria Toensing -- testified that there's no possibility Plame was covert:

WAXMAN: I am stunned, Ms. Toensing, that you would come here with absolute conclusions that she was not a covert agent; the White House did not leak it; no one seemed to know in advance that she was a CIA agent. Do you know those facts for your own firsthand knowledge?

TOENSING: Well, lets just take those one by one. As I said, I was there. I was the chief drafter for chairman --

WAXMAN: I'm not asking for your credentials. I'm asking how you reached those conclusions. Do you --

TOENSING: That's part of my credentials is because I know what the intent of the act was.

WAXMAN: I'm not asking what the intent of the act was.

TOENSING: Well that’s the question.

WAXMAN: Do you know that she was not a covert agent?

TOENSING: She is not a covert agent under the act.

WAXMAN: Okay, so --

TOENSING: You can call anybody anything you want to in the halls of the CIA.

WAXMAN: General Hayden! General Hayden, head of the CIA, told me personally that she was. If I said that she was a covert agent, it wouldn't be an incorrect statement?

TOENSING: Does he want to swear that she was a covert agent under the act?

WAXMAN: I'm trying to say as carefully as I can. He reviewed my statement, and my statement was that she was a covert agent.

TOENSING: Well, he didn't say it was under the act.

WAXMAN: Okay, so you're trying to define it exactly under the act.

TOENSING: That's important.

WAXMAN: No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not giving you -- I'm not yielding my time to you.

Thus, Waxman wouldn't yield his time to... the witness (*** chortle ***).

Sounds like there were a few problems with Plame's testimony.

Was the disclosure of Plame's identity a wanton, stupid act? Certainly. Was it a crime? Apparently not, if prosecutor Fitzgerald's investigation and Toensing's testimony mean anything.

But let's stop and compare this media firestorm with one that fizzled. Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger admitted to the theft and destruction of Top Secret documents. He committed these real crimes just prior to their discovery by the 9/11 Commission's investigation. Has there been any interest expressed in the theft and destruction of material directly related to the greatest terrorist attack in history? No. The mainstream media doesn't appear to care a whit.

And the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy™ says the media is partisan.

The Washington Post and Geneive Abdo's ode to Sharia



Geneive Abdo, writing in The Washington Post, offers a disturbing appraisal of the Secular Islam Summit (hat tip: LGF).

...The self-proclaimed secularists represent only a small minority of Muslims. The views among religious Muslims from CAIR more closely reflect the views of the majority...

If this is true, Abdo should be anything but happy about it. After all, Democratic Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) -- hardly hawks -- have pilloried CAIR for its extremist views. Durbin has called CAIR "unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect"; Schumer said that, "we know [CAIR] has ties to terrorism... [and] intimate links with Hamas."


...The secular Muslim agenda is promoted because these ideas reflect a Western vision for the future of Islam...

No, the secular Muslim agenda is promoted because it acknowledges freedom: the freedom to practice religions other than Islam, the freedom to criticize any religion, and the rights of the individual.

...Since the Sept. 11 attacks, everyone from high-ranking officials in the Bush administration to the author Salman Rushdie has prescribed a preferred remedy for Islam: Reform the faith so it is imbued with Western values -- the privatization of religion, the flourishing of Western-style democracy -- and rulers who are secular, not religious, Muslims. The problem with this prescription is that it is divorced from reality...

What Abdo leaves unsaid is that freedom is at incontrovertible odds with hardline Islamic totalitarianism, represented by countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran. There is no concept of freedom of speech in these regimes; nor any real freedom of religion. Abdo, in other words, cheerleads for totalitarianism.

Abdo also deigns to ignore the utter failures of Arab governments that have embraced hardline ideologies; failures represented by war, censorship, mass imprisonments, sanctioned political murders, and slavery.


...I traveled to Florida to serve as the keynote speaker at an annual convention hosted by CAIR. On my way to the event, I spoke with Imam Siraj Wahaj, a charismatic intellectual... who has thousands of followers here and abroad...

Wahaj is no stranger to anti-American ideology. Salon reports that Wahaj "invited convicted terrorist Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman to speak at his mosque, and... testified on his behalf. ...Just as the USSR fell, so too will the U.S., Wahaj said, 'unless America changes its course from the new world order and accepts the Islamic agenda.'"

From this and other statements, one could easily surmise that Wahaj is an advocate for the destruction of America and its way of life. And it's telling that Abdo would utilize Wahaj as an aspirational example.


...the political future of the Arab world is likely to consist of Islamic parties that are far less tolerant of what has historically been the U.S. foreign policy agenda in the region and that domestically are far more committed to implementing sharia law in varying degrees...

Odd, then, that Abdo fails to mention that model bastion of governmental efficiency, the Taliban. Or other venues where the application of sharia law has resulted in stonings of adulterous women, floggings and executions of homosexuals, suppression of speech and debate, and complete bans on Christianity and Judaism.

Odd, then, that Abdo fails to mention any other religions and how they might coexist with her sharia states.


...the future of the Islamic world will be much more Islamic than Western... ...Instead of championing the loud voices of the secular minority who are capturing media attention with their conferences, manifestos and memoirs, the United States would be wise instead to pay more attention to the far less loquacious majority...

And left unsaid is the only conclusion that can be reached. Islamic Totalitarianism must either be tempered from within or battled from without. As John Lewis, writing in The Objective Standard, noted:

...A government that turns its force against its own citizens, especially to impose an ideological doctrine on them, subordinates the rights of individuals to the demands of the State. This is statism—the elevation of the State over the individual, and the inversion of the very purpose of government. Statism is the greatest killer in history—dwarfing all attacks by criminals—precisely because it is motivated by some form of mystical political ideology. Because statists claim an authority that is above the rights of man—whether the Fuehrer’s master race, the communists’ dialectic, or the theocrat’s God—they do not recognize the principle of individual rights or the self-ownership of men on earth; rather, they claim the right to rule men, and to kill with impunity anyone who disobeys the ideology or regime.

...The Islamic Totalitarian movement has a... fire burning at its core—an authoritarian, state-centered religion, replete with state-funded educational indoctrination, a massive suicide cult on behalf of the deity and state, and hope for a final battle over the Americans. The key to extinguishing this fire, I submit—the sine qua non required to end the spiral of indoctrination, jihad, and suicidal attacks on the West—is to do what was done against Japan: to break the political power of the state religion. State Islam—Totalitarian Islam—rule by Islamic Law—must be obliterated...

Bringing long-term peace to the world, said FDR, "involves the simple formula of placing the objective of this war in terms of an unconditional surrender. . . . Unconditional surrender means not the destruction of the . . . [enemy] populace, but does mean the destruction of a philosophy . . . which is based on the conquest and subjugation of other peoples."

Lewis concludes with a call for freedom: "The Islamic State — Totalitarian Islam — must go. And it is the moral responsibility of every American to demand it."

Conversely, the undercurrent of Abdo's theme is a seeming desire for the destruction of America and the stripping away of all individual freedoms. Abdo doesn't point to a model Arab government that embraces both freedom of speech and freedom to practice other religions (yes, even Christianity and Judaism).

In failing to do so, Abdo markets her own version of religious extremism; a totalitarianism that rejects all other religions. It is a totalitarianism that is at odds with individual freedom. It is a position at odds with all that is America. Abdo's piece, in other words, is a call for statism over individualism.

Abdo is therefore advocating war. She rejects the concepts of individual freedoms and instead praises the scope and direction of sharia law, which acknowledges none of the freedoms that Americans would recognize.

That The Washington Post provides a forum to Abdo for her anti-American drivel is stunning -- but, truth be told, not out of character.


Postscript: Abdo's website notes that she has received support from an intriguing cast of characters:

From 2001-2002, Ms. Abdo was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. That year, Ms. Abdo also received a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. Ms. Abdo has also earned research grants from the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Institute of Peace.